D
Deleted member 66057
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Hey everyone! Thought it would valuable to compile a comprehensive list of the most positive and negative things from the three modern MK games and do so in a respectful way and keep the overall negativity to a minimum (ie this game is unsalvageable etc - if you’re being intellectually honest you know that’s not true). I’ll just include mine here and I hope everyone can just add their thoughts. Obviously there will be disagreements, but the goal is to find some kind of consensus of a lot of these features.
MK9 - This to me represents the purest mortal Kombat experience of the past decade. Going to keep my thoughts here to a monument because I have the least amount of experience with this title.
Pros
Movement - The block dashing in this game felt incredibly smooth
Breaker system- Fair but problematic in the sense that some characters generate significantly more meter than others
Moderate Execution (Kabal nomad dash cancels require some practice and the timing of some of Smoke’s resets could be tricky)
Roster - Meant to be total fan service and it was handled appropriately.
Creativity and combo routes - while I think mkx takes the cake here, there was certainly more high level variance than mk11 for instance.
Xrays and cinematics - The overall consensus seems to be that the cinematic scenes that totally interrupt the flow of the fight either need to go or be kept to a bare minimum . MK 9 introduced them, they were novel, and were fairly quick.
Kahns
Not a lot to say here other than…
Balance - I know a lot of people look at this game with rose tinted glasses. I recently saw post where REO mentioned that if NRS never nerfed Skarlet the game would had one more s tier character and would have been slightly more balanced. That’s ironically true. Cyrax, Kabal, Sonya, Johnny, Kenshi really made the game unbearable for a lot of people and REO had said in the past if the game where released today, there’d be riots in the streets over some of this stuff.
MKX - My personal favorite. This is the game that got me into fighting games and up until the final October 2016 patch was a total broken mess. But I still had fun with it every day. I’ve played a lot since the final 2016 patch and I think this is most fun to be had playing any of the three modern mortal Kombat games currently. Some have argued that game was designed to have armored launchers and the removal of them was still a step in a positive direction even though sone characters benefited significantly more than others (shinnok, mileena, tremor).
Pros
Execution - I want to start here first. I know it’s cool and popular to say MK has no execution, but I really beg to differ. There are character like Displacer Raiden that I’ve been playing for 6 years and I still drop triple drop triple f12b2 or some mid screen visits blast run cancels; Nimble reptile requires decent execution; jaqui Briggs Stanky leg (trick is to hit 44 and hold up briefly); Liu Kang ninja killa style and Shaolin flame into windmill punch, scorpion f4 fbrc into s3 or 214. The run input is also a mechanic that take time getting used to and it be integral to every air to air conversion in the game naturally increases the execution barrier for casuals. I think MKX gets overlooked for this and the fun of figuring out some of this really tricky stuff is what keeps me coming back.
Breaker - I’m including this here again because anything that isn’t mk11 break away is a positive I feel. Same problem as mk9 (mileena almost always has 2 to 3 bars) and there actually was a strategic way to break your opponent into the corner, but didn’t offer literal punishes for the player being combo’d.
Creativity and combo routes - incredibly nuanced and very diverse. It was so much fun to discover new routes, corner carry, set ups.
oki- this game actually had oki and getting knocked down meant you were in serious trouble.
Zoning - in the final build I thought this was handled really well. This is purely opinion but I sincerely don’t believe characters like pre patch deadshot from injustice 2 should exist or Freddy from mk9. I know M2dave will probably have a heart attack reading that (haha sorry man) but it’s simply no fun for most players to navigate an obstacle course of unclashable projectiles the entire match. Purely opinion, put I thought quan chi and full auto jaqui (machine gun could have been adjusted more ) are examples of strong zoning archetypes but because of the nature of the game can’t literally run away the whole match.
Kahns
Roster - it depends who you ask but with the exception of Dvorah, Erron, and Kotal who all returned, I thought most of the new additions were pretty lackluster and uninspired. Take day was cool but Jaqui has nothing iconic besides being the menace of mk11 now and the netotiger videos if people remember 2015. She has gauntlets still but what if anything actually carried over from MKX in terms of play style. That’s a larger discussion about how future mk titles need a it of legacy.
Balance - significantly better than mk9 but in the game‘s final build dragons fire liu kang and crystalline tremor absolutely dominate most characters on the roster including smoke/ sektor who I felt were alway overrated on the tier lists (Smoke to a greater degree). Has anyone every played thunder god vs crystalline ? Do yourself and favor and switch to displaced to save yourself the headache. There are still a greater plethora of s tier character to chose from though and for that reason there‘s Greater variety in tournaments still today.
Run - making the primary method of movement in this game a triple input that induces auto movement I don’t ever want to see return.
Variations - this is a big one but more often than not most character simply had a superior variation and we all know that. There’s no reason to pick balanced over possessed unless you just want to have some fun. Please NRS just make complete characters.
High damaging 50 50s - Looking at you tremor, smoke, kenshi, shinnok. A lot of the overheads became fuzzyable in the final build, but mk11 moved away from this for the better.
MORTAL KOMBAT 11 - I want to say this as respectfully as possible, but for me , no amount of time will improve how I feel about this game. I’ve played this game A LOT mostly as a Raiden main on Xbox, and the amount of frustration I’ve experienced I didn’t think was possible before I played this. There are some things I think it gets right and i don’t think an overhaul would have even been necessary to make this a more fun experience. Just some major quality of life tweaks.
Pros
Balance - If you‘ve been paying attention to the tournament scene, Roethor just beat a jaqui player using Rambo. I’ve played him a few times and here’s a guy that really invested a lot of time into every aspect of lower tier character. Movement, spacing, when to back off, unpredictability. Mk11 did get this right. Balance will never be perfect but I do think this is closest we’ve gotten to always feeling like you have a chance now that kollector vs sheeva isn’t a factor anymore. I still think jaqui Briggs was never balanced appropriately and the lazy incremental health increase and decreases should not return.
Art design - the game looks phenomenal and the vibrant design is preferable to to the murky design of MKX.
Roster - we finally got Fujin and if you’re being objective I think this was a pretty decent collection of characters we got overall.
Kahns - here we go…
Break away - being Punished for attempting an optimal combo or not using a break away safe combo (launcher into d2) is something I never want to experience again.
Fatal blows - my thoughts were always why not just make them tools you can only use on a hit confirm Or mid combo. That way there’s still skill involved with opening your opponent up. Instead we’re still left with with people mashing out Jax’s lighting fast punch or Erron’s gun shots at the highest level many times going unpunished. Many high level players were very vocal about the pushback and it never really got addressed… unless characters are in the corner.
Krushing blows - eating 30 percent grabs because I guessed wrong previously is just not fair or rewarding to either player. Limited them to punishes would have been great and distributing them more evenly throughout the cast.
Wake up forward roll - the wake up system being a total dice roll was hugely problematic but this is the option that made players back off of offense completely.
Invincibility frames on wake up - I’ve never played a game in my life where respectable player and casuals alike are very much aware that holding up when you get knocked down is a very viable option.
Flawless blocking out of negative frames and launching reversals - Wasn‘t the point of removing armored launcher in MKX so that you couldnt launch your opponent as a defensive option? (Exceptions being shinnok, mileena, takeda and a few others with the cost of 2 bars or tremor flash parrying through everything.)
Lack of creativity - the most talked about point seems to be that mk11 is boring and it lacks creativity. Boring is subjective, but it does in fact lack a lot of the creativity and combo routes that previous titles including the injustice games had and the fact that this is the case in spite of kustom variations speaks volumes.
Those are my thoughts , and hope we can have a discussion that leads to something constructive. Some NRS employees have gone on twitter to express that they avoid engaging because of the huge amount of negativity. So let’s try to be respectful and would be amazing if 16bit or dizzy or anyone else on the inside could engage. Community support is key going forward, so hopefully we can transition into a new era (no pun intended) of more transparency on NRS’s side and a greater deal of respect on ours.
MK9 - This to me represents the purest mortal Kombat experience of the past decade. Going to keep my thoughts here to a monument because I have the least amount of experience with this title.
Pros
Movement - The block dashing in this game felt incredibly smooth
Breaker system- Fair but problematic in the sense that some characters generate significantly more meter than others
Moderate Execution (Kabal nomad dash cancels require some practice and the timing of some of Smoke’s resets could be tricky)
Roster - Meant to be total fan service and it was handled appropriately.
Creativity and combo routes - while I think mkx takes the cake here, there was certainly more high level variance than mk11 for instance.
Xrays and cinematics - The overall consensus seems to be that the cinematic scenes that totally interrupt the flow of the fight either need to go or be kept to a bare minimum . MK 9 introduced them, they were novel, and were fairly quick.
Kahns
Not a lot to say here other than…
Balance - I know a lot of people look at this game with rose tinted glasses. I recently saw post where REO mentioned that if NRS never nerfed Skarlet the game would had one more s tier character and would have been slightly more balanced. That’s ironically true. Cyrax, Kabal, Sonya, Johnny, Kenshi really made the game unbearable for a lot of people and REO had said in the past if the game where released today, there’d be riots in the streets over some of this stuff.
MKX - My personal favorite. This is the game that got me into fighting games and up until the final October 2016 patch was a total broken mess. But I still had fun with it every day. I’ve played a lot since the final 2016 patch and I think this is most fun to be had playing any of the three modern mortal Kombat games currently. Some have argued that game was designed to have armored launchers and the removal of them was still a step in a positive direction even though sone characters benefited significantly more than others (shinnok, mileena, tremor).
Pros
Execution - I want to start here first. I know it’s cool and popular to say MK has no execution, but I really beg to differ. There are character like Displacer Raiden that I’ve been playing for 6 years and I still drop triple drop triple f12b2 or some mid screen visits blast run cancels; Nimble reptile requires decent execution; jaqui Briggs Stanky leg (trick is to hit 44 and hold up briefly); Liu Kang ninja killa style and Shaolin flame into windmill punch, scorpion f4 fbrc into s3 or 214. The run input is also a mechanic that take time getting used to and it be integral to every air to air conversion in the game naturally increases the execution barrier for casuals. I think MKX gets overlooked for this and the fun of figuring out some of this really tricky stuff is what keeps me coming back.
Breaker - I’m including this here again because anything that isn’t mk11 break away is a positive I feel. Same problem as mk9 (mileena almost always has 2 to 3 bars) and there actually was a strategic way to break your opponent into the corner, but didn’t offer literal punishes for the player being combo’d.
Creativity and combo routes - incredibly nuanced and very diverse. It was so much fun to discover new routes, corner carry, set ups.
oki- this game actually had oki and getting knocked down meant you were in serious trouble.
Zoning - in the final build I thought this was handled really well. This is purely opinion but I sincerely don’t believe characters like pre patch deadshot from injustice 2 should exist or Freddy from mk9. I know M2dave will probably have a heart attack reading that (haha sorry man) but it’s simply no fun for most players to navigate an obstacle course of unclashable projectiles the entire match. Purely opinion, put I thought quan chi and full auto jaqui (machine gun could have been adjusted more ) are examples of strong zoning archetypes but because of the nature of the game can’t literally run away the whole match.
Kahns
Roster - it depends who you ask but with the exception of Dvorah, Erron, and Kotal who all returned, I thought most of the new additions were pretty lackluster and uninspired. Take day was cool but Jaqui has nothing iconic besides being the menace of mk11 now and the netotiger videos if people remember 2015. She has gauntlets still but what if anything actually carried over from MKX in terms of play style. That’s a larger discussion about how future mk titles need a it of legacy.
Balance - significantly better than mk9 but in the game‘s final build dragons fire liu kang and crystalline tremor absolutely dominate most characters on the roster including smoke/ sektor who I felt were alway overrated on the tier lists (Smoke to a greater degree). Has anyone every played thunder god vs crystalline ? Do yourself and favor and switch to displaced to save yourself the headache. There are still a greater plethora of s tier character to chose from though and for that reason there‘s Greater variety in tournaments still today.
Run - making the primary method of movement in this game a triple input that induces auto movement I don’t ever want to see return.
Variations - this is a big one but more often than not most character simply had a superior variation and we all know that. There’s no reason to pick balanced over possessed unless you just want to have some fun. Please NRS just make complete characters.
High damaging 50 50s - Looking at you tremor, smoke, kenshi, shinnok. A lot of the overheads became fuzzyable in the final build, but mk11 moved away from this for the better.
MORTAL KOMBAT 11 - I want to say this as respectfully as possible, but for me , no amount of time will improve how I feel about this game. I’ve played this game A LOT mostly as a Raiden main on Xbox, and the amount of frustration I’ve experienced I didn’t think was possible before I played this. There are some things I think it gets right and i don’t think an overhaul would have even been necessary to make this a more fun experience. Just some major quality of life tweaks.
Pros
Balance - If you‘ve been paying attention to the tournament scene, Roethor just beat a jaqui player using Rambo. I’ve played him a few times and here’s a guy that really invested a lot of time into every aspect of lower tier character. Movement, spacing, when to back off, unpredictability. Mk11 did get this right. Balance will never be perfect but I do think this is closest we’ve gotten to always feeling like you have a chance now that kollector vs sheeva isn’t a factor anymore. I still think jaqui Briggs was never balanced appropriately and the lazy incremental health increase and decreases should not return.
Art design - the game looks phenomenal and the vibrant design is preferable to to the murky design of MKX.
Roster - we finally got Fujin and if you’re being objective I think this was a pretty decent collection of characters we got overall.
Kahns - here we go…
Break away - being Punished for attempting an optimal combo or not using a break away safe combo (launcher into d2) is something I never want to experience again.
Fatal blows - my thoughts were always why not just make them tools you can only use on a hit confirm Or mid combo. That way there’s still skill involved with opening your opponent up. Instead we’re still left with with people mashing out Jax’s lighting fast punch or Erron’s gun shots at the highest level many times going unpunished. Many high level players were very vocal about the pushback and it never really got addressed… unless characters are in the corner.
Krushing blows - eating 30 percent grabs because I guessed wrong previously is just not fair or rewarding to either player. Limited them to punishes would have been great and distributing them more evenly throughout the cast.
Wake up forward roll - the wake up system being a total dice roll was hugely problematic but this is the option that made players back off of offense completely.
Invincibility frames on wake up - I’ve never played a game in my life where respectable player and casuals alike are very much aware that holding up when you get knocked down is a very viable option.
Flawless blocking out of negative frames and launching reversals - Wasn‘t the point of removing armored launcher in MKX so that you couldnt launch your opponent as a defensive option? (Exceptions being shinnok, mileena, takeda and a few others with the cost of 2 bars or tremor flash parrying through everything.)
Lack of creativity - the most talked about point seems to be that mk11 is boring and it lacks creativity. Boring is subjective, but it does in fact lack a lot of the creativity and combo routes that previous titles including the injustice games had and the fact that this is the case in spite of kustom variations speaks volumes.
Those are my thoughts , and hope we can have a discussion that leads to something constructive. Some NRS employees have gone on twitter to express that they avoid engaging because of the huge amount of negativity. So let’s try to be respectful and would be amazing if 16bit or dizzy or anyone else on the inside could engage. Community support is key going forward, so hopefully we can transition into a new era (no pun intended) of more transparency on NRS’s side and a greater deal of respect on ours.
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